This article is part of the Democracy Futures series, a joint global initiative with the Sydney Democracy Network. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century. This article is the third of four perspectives on the political relevance of anarchy and the prospects for liberty in the world today.

Freedom, that most familiar of concepts in political theory, strikes us today as ever-more ambiguous and opaque.

While freedom has long been the ideological emblem of the liberal capitalist West, it seems increasingly difficult to identify with any real clarity or certainty. Its meaning has been contorted by the rationality of neoliberalism, which offers us only a very narrow notion of freedom through the market while, as Foucault would put it, governing us through our own liberty.

The supposedly free individual is required to conform to certain norms and codes of behaviour, which coincide with the dictates of the market. Thus the individual, in the name of freedom, is pushed back upon himself and becomes solely responsible for his own economic destiny. This inculcates within him an eternal sense of guilt when he fails to live up to prescribed standards of success or “resilience”.

Furthermore, freedom has become absolutely hinged to the ideology of security that is now omnipresent in liberal societies.

We might add to this a consideration of the innumerable daily instances where, in liberal states (I now use this term advisedly), freedom is constrained and curtailed – by, for instance, over-zealous lawmakers, judiciaries, police and other state institutions and private corporations – not to mention the lack of economic “liberty” experienced by the majority of the dispossessed around the world.

We are tempted to say that the concept of freedom finds itself in a dead-end. When we talk about freedom today, we literally don’t know what we’re talking about.

Stirner on freedom from within

Max Stirner in 1900.Félix Valloton

In the mid-19th century, the little-known German Young Hegelian philosopher Max Stirner was already arguing that the discourse of freedom was exhausted.

The problem with the standard notions of freedom was that they were dependent on certain external conditions and institutions, like the liberal state, or on the fulfilment of some promise of revolutionary emancipation. They thus reduced freedom to a kind of spectral ideal that always concealed new forms of domination.

If freedom is associated with a certain regime of law or type of community, or is aligned with a higher rational and moral ideal, this in effect alienates the individual’s freedom.

If freedom is associated with a form of state, then one allows the state to determine the limits of freedom.

If freedom is seen as an ideal to be achieved within a higher rational and moral community, then one either pursues an impossible dream, or allows freedom to be determined by a revolutionary vanguard seeking to impose its own vision on society.

In other words, according to Stirner, if external conditions and standards are seen to prescribe and determine the extent of freedom, one ends up disempowering individuals and robbing them of their own capacities for freedom. Such were the limits of freedom that Stirner proposed an alternative notion of ownness, by which he intended a more radical understanding of self-ownership.

What is ownness? Unlike the mystification of freedom, the pursuit of which has become a hollow game (the same could be said about democracy), ownness is a much more tangible experience. I understand it as ontological freedom: the freedom one always already has.

Radical self-ownership is a form of freedom we already have.Eric Huybrechts/flickr

What does this mean? First, it is a singular form of freedom, which is left to individuals to create for themselves, rather than conforming to any universalised or institutionally defined ideal.

Nor is it a question of emancipation, as this simply risks another form of domination – we have seen this in many revolutions aimed at “freeing” a subjugated people. Rather, it is up to the individuals themselves, affirming themselves and their own indifference to all forms of power.

While this might sound like a form of wishful thinking – this was Marx and Engels’ claim against Stirner – it alerts us to what La Boétie saw as the voluntary servitude and wilful obedience that underpinned all forms of domination. The flipside of this was a wilful disobedience and a reclamation of one’s own power.

Perhaps we can say that ownness is the experience of self-affirmation and empowerment that ontologically precedes all acts of liberation. Let’s take Stirner’s example of the slave. While the slave has little or no freedom in his chains, he nevertheless has ownness, a sense of self-possession. It is the one thing his master cannot take from him:

That I then become free from him and his whip is only the consequence of my antecedent egoism.

In this situation, freedom, whether liberal or republican, whether understood as non-interference or non-domination, simply cannot account for the slave’s sense of autonomy, his understanding of himself as his own property and not anyone else’s.

Lessons for today

What lessons does this have for us today? In recent years we have witnessed an unprecedented breakdown and crisis of legitimacy in our representative political institutions.

In the hands of our political elites, all these high-minded ideals of liberty, rights and democracy no longer signify anything; they have come to be associated with the worst hypocrisies and abuses.

At the same time, we have learnt – rightly – to be wary of revolutionary promises of liberation and alternative forms of social order as an antidote to the current situation. The question of freedom today is located in this gap between crumbling institutions and the eclipse of utopian horizons.

In response to this deadlock we have seen new forms of political experimentation, in which people seek to define their own lives and their relations with others in ways that are autonomous from dominant modes of political and economic organisation.

Institutions are not destroyed – for what would this lead to but simply a new kind of institutionalisation? Rather they are profaned; used without identifying with or investing in them.

We start to think and act as though power no longer existed. This is not the freedom of the neoliberal subject, sacrificing himself to the God of the Market, but the self-determination of owners invested in themselves and, through themselves, in others.

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2 weeks agoby sydneydemocracyProfessor Baogang He, Alfred Deakin Professor, Chair in International Relations, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Education, Deakin University and Professor John Keane interrogate authoritarianism and democracy at ACRI UTS

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A closer look at the way politics has changed
Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two

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A closer look at the way politics has changed

Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two leading scholars to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Authoritarian populist parties have gained votes and seats in many countries, and entered government in states as diverse as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Across Europe, their average share of the vote in parliamentary elections remains limited but it has more than doubled since the 1960s and their share of seats tripled. Even small parties can still exert tremendous ‘blackmail’ pressure on governments and change the policy agenda, as demonstrated by UKIP’s role in catalyzing Brexit.

The danger is that populism undermines public confidence in the legitimacy of liberal democracy while authoritarianism actively corrodes its principles and practices. It also increases the resolve of authoritarian regimes around the world. This public forum sets out to explain the growth and character of these regimes and the polarisation over the cultural cleavage dividing social liberals and social conservatives in the electorates, and how these differences of values translate into support for authoritarian-populist parties and leaders in the U.S. and Europe, and elsewhere. The forum highlights the dangers to liberal democracy arising from these developments and what could be done to mitigate the risks.

This event brings together Professor Pippa Norris and Professor John Keane to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Professor Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Professor John Keane will discuss his new book When trees fall, monkeys scatter.

The Speakers:

Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Pippa is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for more than a quarter century. She is ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. Her research compares public opinion and elections, political institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide. She is ranked the 4th most cited political scientist worldwide, according to Google scholar. Major honors include, amongst others, the Skytte prize, the Karl Deutsch award, and the Sir Isaiah Berlin award. Her current work focuses on a major research project, www.electoralintegrityproject.com, established in 2012 and also a new book with Ronald Inglehart “Cultural Backlash” analyzing support for populist-authoritarianism.

John Keane will discuss his new book When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: rethinking democracy in China. He is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and Distinguished Professor at Peking University. He is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. He is the Director and co-founder of the Sydney Democracy Network. He has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Harper’s, the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post. His online column ‘Democracy field notes’ appears regularly in the London, Cambridge- and Melbourne­-based The Conversation. Among his best-known books are the best-selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy (2004), Democracy and MediaDecadence (2013) and the highly acclaimed full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). His most recent books are A Short History of the Future of Elections (2016) and When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017), and he is now completing a new book on the global spread of despotism.

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Speaker: Professor Gerry Stoker, University of Southampton
Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this

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Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this seminar Gerry Stoker explains how and why anti-political sentiment has grown among British citizens over the last half-century drawing on research about to be published in a Cambridge University Press book co-authored with Nick Clarke, Will Jennings and Jonathan Moss. The book offers a range of conceptual developments to help explore how citizens think about politics and the issue of negativity towards politics and uses responses to public opinion surveys alongside a unique data source-the diaries, reports and letters collected by Mass Observation. The book reveals that anti-politics has grown in scope and intensity when seen through the lens of a long view of the issue stretching back over multiple decades. Such growth is explained by citizens’ changing images of ‘the good politician’ and changing modes of political interaction between politicians and citizens. The seminar will conclude by placing these findings in a broader comparative context and exploring the implications for efforts to reform and improve democratic politics.

Chair: Dr Thomas Wynter

Discussant: Professor Ariadne Vromen

Time

(Tuesday) 11:45 am - 1:30 pm

Location

Room 276

Merewether Building, University of Sydney http://sydney.edu.au/arts/about/maps.shtml?locationID=[[H04]]

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Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against

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Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine State causing more than 650,000 Rohingyas to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous “war on drugs” has claimed more than 12,000 victims, predominantly the urban poor, including children. And the Cambodian government’s broad political crackdown in 2017 targeting the political opposition, independent media and human rights groups has effectively extinguished the country’s flickering democratic system at the expense of basic rights.

Australia’s 2017 White Paper includes the goals of “promoting an open, inclusive and prosperous Indo–Pacific region in which the rights of all states are respected” as well as the need to protect and promote the international rules based order. So what role does Australia play in addressing these problems and what more could the Australian government be doing?

To discuss these matters, we are delighted to welcome Elaine Pearson.

Elaine Pearson is the Australia Director at Human Rights Watch. Based in Sydney, she works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to give them a human rights dimension. She regularly briefs journalists, politicians and government officials, appears on television and radio programs, testifies before parliamentary committees and speaks at public events. She is an adjunct lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division based in New York.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Elaine worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. She is an expert on migration and human trafficking issues and sits on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Pearson holds degrees in law and arts from Australia’s Murdoch University and obtained her Master’s degree in public policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

She writes frequently for publications including Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

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Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way

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Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way they emerge out of ecclesiastical institutions and practices. However, I will suggest that Foucault’s contribution to political theology in a sense turns the paradigm on its head and signals a radical departure from the Schmittian model.

Foucault does not seek to sanctify power and authority in modernity, but rather to disrupt their functioning and consistency by identifying their hidden origins, unmasking their contingency and indeterminacy, and bringing before our gaze historical alternatives. Furthermore, Foucault introduces to the debate around political theology something that was entirely missing from it – the idea of the subject. The notion of the ‘confessing subject’ – the individual who, from earliest Christian times, has been taught to confess his secrets and thus form a truth about himself – is central to Foucault’s concerns, as are the ethical strategies through which the subject might constitute himself in alternative ways that allow a greater degree of autonomy. And while in the past, religious institutions and practices, particularly the Christian pastorate, have sought to render the subject obedient and governable, at other times, including in modernity, religious ideas have been a source of disobedience, revolt and what Foucault calls ‘counter-conducts’. It is here that I will develop the idea of ‘political spirituality’, showing how this notion can operate as a radical counter-point to political theology.

About the speaker:

Saul Newman is Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and currently a Visiting Professor at the Sydney Democracy Network. His research is in continental political thought and contemporary political theory. Mostly known for his research on postanarchism, he also works on questions of sovereignty, human rights, as well as on the thought of the nineteenth century German individualist anarchist, Max Stirner. His most recent work is on political theology and post-secular politics, and he has a new book forthcoming with Polity called Political Theology: a Critical Introduction.

Time

(Thursday) 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

Seminar Room 498

Merewether Building, University of Sydney

Organizer

Department of Government and International Relationsmadeleine.pill@sydney.edu.au